The Monterey Jazz Festival and Kuumbwa Jazz join together to present Béla Fleck, with Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, and Bryan Sutton, featuring music from Fleck’s new album, My Bluegrass Heart. Of the collaboration between Monterey Jazz Festival and Kuumbwa Jazz, Tim Jackson, Artistic Director for both nonprofits, shares “I’m really pleased to see two great organizations join forces with the purpose of bringing more great music to the Santa Cruz-Monterey area.”
 
“They nearly always come back,” said Fleck. “All the people that leave bluegrass. I had a strong feeling that I’d be coming back as well.” My Bluegrass Heart is that return the 15-time Grammy-winner is talking about – the third chapter in a decades-spanning trilogy which, by his counting, stated with 1988’s Drive and continued with The Bluegrass Sessions. Over the long and lauded course of this unique creative run, Fleck ­– the world’s premier banjo virtuoso and a celebrated musical adventurer – has both dug deep into his instrument’s complex global history and unlocked the breadth of its possibilities. My Bluegrass Heart is a homecoming in sound, to be sure.
 
In some ways, Fleck has always thought of himself as coming from the outside of bluegrass. “I don’t come from the South, and I always felt like there were people who were more truly focused on doing that bluegrass thing really well. What I tended to want to do was expand the banjo’s role and look for new things to do with it. Despite that, I was always a bluegrass guy first and foremost. That was certainly my musical soul.”

PRICE: $70 – $120
MORE INFO: https://bit.ly/3DQl3wH